We hated Quark, the program and the company. But of course we used it because it was ubiquitous. InDesign 1.0 wasn't great, but we were so desperate to move away from Quark that we slowly converted. Their lack of OS X support really pissed us off. We'd run all our apps natively and then have to bring up the classic environment and the "chooser" to print Quark files.

Quark was just so damned unfriendly. The licensing, the tech support, the pricing and the program itself. Serious question, does modern Quark let you use hotkeys to select different tools? Haven't touched the program in ten years.

We hated Quark, the program and the company. But of course we used it because it was ubiquitous. InDesign 1.0 wasn't great, but we were so desperate to move away from Quark that we slowly converted. Their lack of OS X support really pissed us off. We'd run all our apps natively and then have bring up the classic environment and the "chooser" to print Quark files.

Quark was just so damned unfriendly. The licensing, the tech support, the pricing and the program itself. Serious question, does modern Quark let you use hotkeys to select different tools? Haven't touched the program in ten years.

I'm still angry at them for the way that you couldn't see the .eps artwork you'd "placed" into your file.

It was ridiculous! When Adobe stepped in, it was like the cavalry arriving. "You want to actually see the artwork? No problem. What's the big deal? We've been doing this for years."

You might be thinking of Pagemill, an Adobe front-end web tool from the late 90s.

Maybe? I thought "Design" featured in the name. The main thing they used if for was building an Illustrator-like image to be the page and then were able to select objects out to be buttons and actually have it spit out javascript for rollovers. Then it broke the whole thing apart into a hellish table/frameset abomination that I had to contend with.

Was it LiveMotion or ImageStyler maybe? (i had to go to Wikipedia to look up those names)

Hmm... ImageStyler sounds familiar too. I had a strong sense that whatever it was sort of being slowly dropped by the time I got stuck with it.

You might be thinking of Pagemill, an Adobe front-end web tool from the late 90s.

Maybe? I thought "Design" featured in the name. The main thing they used if for was building an Illustrator-like image to be the page and then were able to select objects out to be buttons and actually have it spit out javascript for rollovers. Then it broke the whole thing apart into a hellish table/frameset abomination that I had to contend with.

That sounds to me like ImageReady that was bundled with Photoshop for a while.

OMG - you think you had it bad where Quark was $300 more than InDesign. I was working in prepress at the time of The Big Switch and at that stage Quark was, seriously, $3500. Or was it $4500? InDesign was something like $900 or $1200 in comparison (or, as was mentioned above, "free" with Creative Suite)

Even then, if Quark hadn't have dissed their entire user base, even with InDesign being given away for free, there still would have been reluctance to switch. But as soon as the CEO of Quark invited people to switch, switch they did and never looked back.

Oh god, Quark. I was beginning my career in IT in 2000-2001 at a student newspaper. I had to learn Quark like everyone else to be able to help troubleshoot problems with the software.

All of the things in the article are correct from a design and publishing point of view. From an IT point of view, the worst part of Quark was the damned hardware dongles you had to install. Parallel port at first, but eventually they released USB keys you had to have installed and activated for the freaking software to work.

I think I spent a month of my life over two years futzing around with those stupid dongles. They'd work for a week and a Windows Update would cause something to reset and you'd have to re-activate. Or maybe it was a reboot of the computer would do it. Or the sun was yellow and the moon white that day. Or someone drank water in it's almighty and unforgiving presence. Or someone in the same state sneezed too loudly for it's sensitive ears.

Royal pains in the neck and I sincerely hope hardware dongles go away forever. I sit here and read people complain about always-online or the necessity to activate-online and all the belly aching about that. Those are minor inconveniences in comparison to the finicky hardware dongles used by Quark.

Ironically, when InDesign appeared, you started seeing Windows PCs being used for desktop publishing.

The questions "Why don't you just use Windows?" or "Why do we need to buy you a Mac? Why don't you just install Quark on your Windows machine?" sent chills down my spine. I would try to patiently explain to these people that any time you were using a computer to deal with 1) a picture; 2) a font (like, a real font with kerning tables and ligatures) or 3) a color, you didn't want Microsoft anywhere near you...but my success rate was never very high.

“You need the recent version of Adobe Flash Player to view coubs.”Bah. I am on the last version for my platform. (Not that one should need the latest whiz-bang version to view the equivalent of an animated GIF.)

There's a link to a source video on YouTube, though -- so no losses there, I've never been into the image macro/looping animated GIF/YTMND fads anyway.

My personal story starts exactly the same: I attended arts magnet in Dallas and somehow fell into desktop publishing with vectorworks. But later I was the best Quark guru in Dallas for years. By the time InDesign came out it was clear that it was Quark's market to lose. Wild times for tech!

No offence, but some of us enjoyed reading through this article. It's fine and dandy, that you've read up on this before. I haven't to such an extent though and so when it came up, I was excited to read through it.

Agreed.1. Ars has done several history of computing articles over the years. The Quark / Adobe war is a topic that was reported throughout the 90s by the computer press and I appreciated the update by Dave. 2. Just because a computer history topic has been written about before doesn't mean it can never be written about again.

I used to work in a print shop that originally had Page Maker and then Quark 5 & 6…eventually buying CS4 for our 3 OSX workstations and 2 Windows workstations. For a long time when I had free time, I would spend that time taking files from Page Maker and converting them to Quark with the PM2Q extension on our old System 9 workstation…you know the old dusty G3 PPC with the translucent blue case that sat in the corner and people tried to stay away from it at all costs. I'm pretty sure every modern shop had one at the time…and may still have one…still chugging away and fighting the bomb.

Once we got InDesign I spent that time converting files from Quark 6 down to 5 and then again down to 4 so I could convert them to InDesign files. I hated Page Maker enough to endure Quark and then Quark that much more to open files up twice just to get them into InDesign. Also if I recall, I had to convert Quark 6 files down to Quark 5, but they wouldn't convert down to 4 in Quark 6, so I had to open them in Quark 5 to get them down to 4. Yes, I hated Quark that much.

Though the converted files were not always amazing…and sometimes not even useable. I had to do a lot of clean up in many cases. The department supervisor was not always thrilled about this as she was a Quark person whereas I could not get away from it fast enough.

Someone earlier mentioned MS Publisher. Don't get me started with MS Publisher. Some of my biggest messiest jobs required that…and those files did not convert to anything very well at all…so I was stuck mucking around in Publisher. I wanted to implement a policy for our CSRs to tell customers that we don't accept MS Publisher files. It never went anywhere.

I read this with a heavy heart; QuarkXPress was an ever-present in my life since the early-to-mid 90s. And I still love fiddling about with page layouts. But you're right, few companies seemed to display such contempt for their customers and deliver such high-priced yet disappointing upgrades.

Actually, although I worked in almost exclusively Mac environments, I had Quark 6.5 running pretty sweetly on Windows XP for several years, although with the caveat that I'm an editor who used templates proper designers created for me. So I probably didn't encounter several the issues faced by other commenters. (Plus I was a department of one.)

I began working in graphic design by producing print advertisements for a UK charity around 2004. They had the latest version of Quark and Adobe Illustrator 8 (I think!). Quark was utterly mind boggling, slow, and unintuitive, so the ads got made in illustrator. One sunny day I got packed off to an InDesign conference and treated to CS2. Since then InDesign has been my go-to for page layout, Illustrator for vector work, and Photoshop for image manipulation and more complex artwork. Oh, and I became a freelancer a few years ago.

I use Adobe CC, and it's generally solid, but the prices are outdated. Yes, on the one hand, the main tools I earn my living with cost about £500 a year, but on the other, look how little Apple charge for software nowadays, and once you've bought it from Apple, you've bought it....

If I could buy the equivalent software from Apple for less than a year's rental from Adobe, I'd move over. And I'm pretty sure most of the printers I use who are clinging to CS6 would too.

No offence, but some of us enjoyed reading through this article. It's fine and dandy, that you've read up on this before. I haven't to such an extent though and so when it came up, I was excited to read through it.

Agreed.1. Ars has done several history of computing articles over the years. The Quark / Adobe war is a topic that was reported throughout the 90s by the computer press and I appreciated the update by Dave. 2. Just because a computer history topic has been written about before doesn't mean it can never be written about again.

Agreed. Interesting story, but never heard about it. Knew DTP was out there, but many software engineers never go near them. Some good lessons here for software companies, including Adobe! Haha!

There is one very old story of computer typography which both Quark (absolutely) and Adobe (mostly) abandoned: TeX of prof. Donald Knuth. Still used by many people from academic institutions over all the world. Used for typesetting of ancient languages, for example. Both Quark and InDesign or Word, … use the TeX engine to type mathematical formulas. There are solved mostly all problems of classical typography. Nor Quark, nor InDesign use the page over optimisation of text as TeX, Quark only line by line, InDesign only paragraph. So there is still open door. TeX engine is free, but not for commercial use. Check, what the TeX is able to do.

I met somewhere at beginning of 90th Mr. Ebrahimi (it was time of Acrobat 1). He was stone deaf to users remarks. I was curious that time how long the Quark will be only one. 15 years! Not more.

Ironically, when InDesign appeared, you started seeing Windows PCs being used for desktop publishing.

The questions "Why don't you just use Windows?" or "Why do we need to buy you a Mac? Why don't you just install Quark on your Windows machine?" sent chills down my spine. I would try to patiently explain to these people that any time you were using a computer to deal with 1) a picture; 2) a font (like, a real font with kerning tables and ligatures) or 3) a color, you didn't want Microsoft anywhere near you...but my success rate was never very high.

Why?

indeed, why? when running adobe software you're actually using adobe code rather than microsoft's, most fonts these days are otf - and windows since xp has been able to handle postscript fonts natively if required. many printer RIPs have windows front ends too that handle PDF/PS.

cs5 on pc is where i've been since 2009 or so. i wont be upgrading to CC until i have to.

I heard some dirt - unconfirmed - that the delay to getting it OSX ready came from them trying to offshore all the programming work, and it turned out that it was way too complex for their developers at the time. It seems making things that have Postscript, display, deep integration with the OS, fonts, and ripping was just too much. It sounds legit, but I have no sources. Not really important now.

If you’re talking Quark here, yeah, I remember (I think more than rumors) reports of most of their engineers in the US let go and development moved to India because that was the hip thing to do at the time. Was before 8 came out, I think?

The DTP market is interesting in that the majority share shifted twice - first there was Pagemaker that lost it (why, I don't really know. I know that there were features people missed in Pagemaker - being able to open more than one document, free rotation - but it was certainly the much easier program to use) and then Quark who truly squandered their lead by staying on 3.something forever and not prioritizing OS X development

I did prepress work in several environments (including real design shops, nonprofits and companies where I was "the graphics/prepress guy") and every time anybody even mentioned "Windows" and "prepress" in the same sentence I instantly knew I was in trouble...and I would have to back slowly away without making sudden movements etc.

The questions "Why don't you just use Windows?" or "Why do we need to buy you a Mac? Why don't you just install Quark on your Windows machine?" sent chills down my spine. I would try to patiently explain to these people that any time you were using a computer to deal with 1) a picture; 2) a font (like, a real font with kerning tables and ligatures) or 3) a color, you didn't want Microsoft anywhere near you...but my success rate was never very high.

Oh great, one of those guys. I'm sorry, I've been doing professional graphics and design since the '80s. I've worked on Macs, PCs, SGIs, Suns, Amigas, BeOS, Linux and even a Pixar computer once. This whole myth that Macs are just inherently better for graphics than PCs, is the biggest load of crap ever to be foisted on the design world. A computer is a computer. What application you are using has a lot more to do with your graphics capabilities that what OS you're using.

There were features in the late '80s in AT&T Rio (for DOS), like 32bit alpha blends, and a combined vector/raster workflow, that wouldn't be available on the Mac until years later. There were UNIX-based SGML programs with features that PC and Mac software would take decades to catch up with. There were SGI programs which had features that PC and Mac software has only started incorporating in the last few years. And don't even get me started about how ahead of its time (and buggy) the Amiga was!

I've worked with a ton of you "if you're doing design or print, you need a Mac" guys over the decades I've been doing this, and without fail, you always come armed with a veritable pile of half-truths, misunderstandings, and sometimes outright lies, about the capabilities of any system but your precious Macs. Every time I'm unfortunate enough to work with someone like that, I get an image in my head of how it would go if a carpenter showed up on a job site, and said "oh, you're using Ryobi nail guns? Well I can't build a house with Ryobi nail guns. Anyone who knows anything, knows that you can't make a decent building with Ryobi tools!"

Ironically, when InDesign appeared, you started seeing Windows PCs being used for desktop publishing.

The questions "Why don't you just use Windows?" or "Why do we need to buy you a Mac? Why don't you just install Quark on your Windows machine?" sent chills down my spine. I would try to patiently explain to these people that any time you were using a computer to deal with 1) a picture; 2) a font (like, a real font with kerning tables and ligatures) or 3) a color, you didn't want Microsoft anywhere near you...but my success rate was never very high.

Why?

Because in the past, Microsoft didn’t care about those things very much (see "Add Font Dialog" that went unchanged from Windows ~3 to 7 or so?), because most non-Adobe software products on Windows ignored color profiles (dunno if lack of APIs or simply developer ignorance?), because there was a difference between file encoding when PowerPC was around (little/big endian) that a lot of Windows applications couldn’t deal with, because simple drag & drop between apps didn’t work properly, and so on and so forth. Even Windows’ font rendering, to this day, follows the philosophy of "fitting things into pixels" instead of "anti-aliasing to approximate to the correct shape", which often makes the point of using different fonts moot. Even small stuff like thumbnail previews in Explorer/Finder is something that can make a big difference in your workflow. All of this influenced people’s expectations and approaches to work (up to the point of Windows designers not knowing about color profiles in the first place), something that made cooperation within the industry problematic (seeing as how most professional DTP and design companies were Mac-based).

You could use Windows for design and DTP work, sure, it was just slightly more tedious here and there. The problem with "slightly more tedious here and there", though, is that it sums up if you’re doing it 6-8 hours a day, 3-5 days a week. And even if you were on a Mac, as a designer you often got files created in a Windows environment that you had to work with/untangle/etc, which fueled the frustration with Windows even more.

In a way, you could even argue that that the whole industry moved forward (Windows, OS X, Adobe), while Quark went all "You know what? Windows NT 4 and Mac OS 9 are fine."

fought the power is right, though, that the environment of a designer moved more into "Adobe" and away from "Windows or Mac", so a lot of the frustrations are gone (while new, Adobe-specific ones are showing up).

indeed, why? when running adobe software you're actually using adobe code rather than microsoft's, most fonts these days are otf - and windows since xp has been able to handle postscript fonts natively if required. many printer RIPs have windows front ends too that handle PDF/PS.

cs5 on pc is where i've been since 2009 or so. i wont be upgrading to CC until i have to.

Nowadays it's basically parity, but back then Windows was awful for desktop publishing. Terrible font support, no platform color correction, horrific driver support for tablets, scanners, and printers, and don't even GO there with SCSI. Ugh.

I basically worked a service bureau gig for a short time in the waning days of newspapers and QuarkXPress, and anything designed on Windows just fell apart when it came time to RIP due to all sorts of crazy little problems and inconsistencies due to the platform just not being built to handle graphics and fonts anywhere near what the Mac had at the time.

SO glad those days are over. I still prefer the Mac due to liking the OS more, but I'd design on a Windows box without hesitation nowadays.

Oh great, one of those guys. I'm sorry, I've been doing professional graphics and design since the '80s. I've worked on Macs, PCs, SGIs, Suns, Amigas, BeOS, Linux and even a Pixar computer once. This whole myth that Macs are just inherently better for graphics than PCs, is the biggest load of crap ever to be foisted on the design world. A computer is a computer. What application you are using has a lot more to do with your graphics capabilities that what OS you're using.

Oh great, one of those guys…

Your main point is true, sure, but there are differences, and always were. Macs have had color profile support that developers took advantage of for ages, the build in PDF support in OS X (especially the speed compared to Acrobat Reader), the file format support (when it comes to Finder and previews), since OS X the terminal that allows sh scripting, better font rendering, proper system-wide Unicode support (even if "only" needed to quickly open files with text for your layouts and copy from them; the fact that šžčüø etc were preserved without hassle saved time), better (exposed) support for monitor calibration and various others do make a difference when working as a designer.

Of course there’s no show-stopping thing preventing people from using Windows, and obviously the platform has no impact whatsoever on how professional or competent a designer is. But saying that the OS has no impact whatsoever on how easy it is to do your work just just as big a pile of crap.

Unless you’re still on DOS 7 with Lynx (or some such) and, like, totes happy with it when browsing Ars, obviously.

Exactly how I remember it too. I started using Quark in the late 90s, right up until 2004 when InDesign CS2 was released. The whole industry switch from Quark 4.1 to Indesign pretty much overnight.

Even though Quark 5 and had been released no-one, due to the non-existent OS X support and general bugginess, not even the printers I worked with, had upgraded to it. Instead they went to CS2.

It's hard to remember what a crappy experience Quark was in those days - I had some serious flashbacks reading the article. Even installing it was a pain. The bulk of the software came on a CD-ROM, but it needed an installer. On a floppy disk. Installing on an iMac was not fun, requiring scrounging an external floppy drive from somewhere. In the end I made my own installer that didn't need it.

And running it, oh man. It was always such a dispiriting experience having to boot up classic mode just to open a document. By 2003 I'd moved fully to 10.2 and it felt wrong to sully my shiny anglepoise iMac with grubby classic. Shallow I know.

However there are things that I miss about QuarkXpress:

It was fast. Like really fast. It could run happily on an old pizza box Mac LC, probably faster than InDesign does on my relatively recent MBP, and flew on my 800mhz iMac. Starting Adobe software feels like watching a fat man get out of bed in the morning.

Keyboard shortcuts. These were excellent. I still customise InDesign to use Quark's shortcuts.

Like the article says, Adobe have got fat and lazy, with no competition to make them competitive. Their updates have gone from providing exciting new features to squeezing more money out of increasingly creaky and bloated software, and their lack of attention and polish is obvious.

I'm really hoping that there's another company somewhere busy scheming to Adobe Quark, but I'm not holding my breath. The days of monolithic desktop software seems to be coming to an end - startups mostly focus on the web or mobile and the larger companies with the resources and talent to do it have either been bought by Adobe or have no interest in getting into the market.

The DTP market is interesting in that the majority share shifted twice - first there was Pagemaker that lost it (why, I don't really know. I know that there were features people missed in Pagemaker - being able to open more than one document, free rotation - but it was certainly the much easier program to use)...

From what I remember of the transition at a little university newspaper there were numerous improvements for editors that gave Quark an edge, but the big deal was that it was much quicker to get printed. I wasn't involved in that side of things, but there seemed to be much less faffing at the printers.

In part I imagine that was down to the advantages of homogeneity -- the whole industry was moving to Quark -- but it also had much better preflighting, and we were much more confident that the end product would match the screen version.

The DTP market is interesting in that the majority share shifted twice - first there was Pagemaker that lost it (why, I don't really know. I know that there were features people missed in Pagemaker - being able to open more than one document, free rotation - but it was certainly the much easier program to use) and then Quark who truly squandered their lead by staying on 3.something forever and not prioritizing OS X development

Are you remember Tim Gill? The man who made the briliant analysis behind the Quark? Quark was based on very simple and exact philosophy: 1. everything is in box, 2. PostScript, 3. you may change the position of box by typing numbers. In that time, Quark was in version 1, it was everything what PCs (personal computers) were able to manipulate in "real" time. Many effects were quit simple by a bit calculation and typing. PageMaker????

Adobe: this company made (from my point of view) two critical steps: 1. it change developers platform from MacOS to Windows (NT) and 2. it begun THE INTERNET COMPANY. The CS Cloud step is third one but I'm not forced anyway to follow it. If you know OSX a bit you should know that half of Photoshop filters and effects are native in OSX system library. PDF engine is behind screen rendering. But Adobe never used these native technologies.

So I'm curious - how long the Adobe will be only ONE.

BTW, you may adjust the first letter of paragraph position in Quark simply to add space before it and change the kerning of that space.

indeed, why? when running adobe software you're actually using adobe code rather than microsoft's, most fonts these days are otf - and windows since xp has been able to handle postscript fonts natively if required. many printer RIPs have windows front ends too that handle PDF/PS.

cs5 on pc is where i've been since 2009 or so. i wont be upgrading to CC until i have to.

Oh great, one of those guys. I'm sorry, I've been doing professional graphics and design since the '80s. I've worked on Macs, PCs, SGIs, Suns, Amigas, BeOS, Linux and even a Pixar computer once. This whole myth that Macs are just inherently better for graphics than PCs, is the biggest load of crap ever to be foisted on the design world. A computer is a computer. What application you are using has a lot more to do with your graphics capabilities that what OS you're using.

There were features in the late '80s in AT&T Rio (for DOS), like 32bit alpha blends, and a combined vector/raster workflow, that wouldn't be available on the Mac until years later. There were UNIX-based SGML programs with features that PC and Mac software would take decades to catch up with. There were SGI programs which had features that PC and Mac software has only started incorporating in the last few years. And don't even get me started about how ahead of its time (and buggy) the Amiga was!

I've worked with a ton of you "if you're doing design or print, you need a Mac" guys over the decades I've been doing this, and without fail, you always come armed with a veritable pile of half-truths, misunderstandings, and sometimes outright lies, about the capabilities of any system but your precious Macs. Every time I'm unfortunate enough to work with someone like that, I get an image in my head of how it would go if a carpenter showed up on a job site, and said "oh, you're using Ryobi nail guns? Well I can't build a house with Ryobi nail guns. Anyone who knows anything, knows that you can't make a decent building with Ryobi tools!"

I figured this would happen when I wrote the initial post...and happen it did (complete with the "those guys" appellation) (and I thank smoofles and shnee for doing the heavy lifting in responding).

What irritates me here is two things. First, the points that have been covered, regarding the half-assed way that Windows handled the issues I mentioned (colors, fonts, pictures) and, as with so many Microsoft problems, the complex and time-consuming hurdles that had to be faced at the time because Windows couldn't understand the .eps concept and couldn't handle font metrics is a fashion suitable for getting text into any kind of environment with real visual standards (like magazines and books) and didn't know what color management was.

That "Microsoft moment" -- when you bang against a cement wall created by somebody in one building in Redmond who has no idea how somebody in another building in Redmond solved the same problem and does it their own weird way, or when somebody else in Redmond looks at a difficult problem in reconciling two protocols or two elements of the OS and rather than solving it just says "Oh, well" and leaves it there unsolved -- is one that I remember encountering many, many times in those instances in the prepress world where I was forced to use Windows.

That's the first thing that irritates me. The second thing that irritates me is the implicit condescending attitude. Don't you understand (both of you) that, back in those days, prepress was my job, my bread and butter? Haven't you read the scores of posts here from people lamenting their complex and grueling struggles with Quark? Do these seem like dull-witted or lazy people? Don't you think that I tried to work on graphics/prepress projects in Windows before I decided to speak contemptuously about it? Do you think I rather was just like some kind of petulant child who wanted a Mac for trivial reasons?

The implication is that design professionals somehow aren't real professionals; that we're effete "latté drinkers" or whatever who don't know our way around technology and can't solve problems and like to complain. There is absolutely no reason to think this. In my years doing prepress, there was never a single moment when anyone doing it for real had the slightest patience for Windows because it didn't work.

The only people who recommended Windows as a Quark environment, by definition, were dilettantes who did company newsletters or other amateur projects and never had to deal with filmsetters or linotronic technology or pantone colors or any of the real constraints of professional publishing. And the same contrast is emerging here on this board, years later, long after the dust has settled and Quark is gone. Can't you take our word for it? Can't you say, "These guys have been in the trenches; if they shudder at the thought of doing prepress with Windows, they must be right; they must have a point?" Can't you evince that modicum of respect?

Sorry to get so strident, but as "one of those guys" I've been dealing with this -- specifically this -- for most of my professional life. When lmlloyd referred to our "misunderstandings" and "outright lies" in defense of our "precious Macs," it conjured up a million awful, unnecessary arguments I had back in the day with people who thought that way, and I don't miss it one bit. It seems like prepress/design is the only field of technology-based endeavor where nobody says, "You know what? These guys do it for a living; why don't we listen to them."

Are you remember Tim Gill? The man who made the briliant analysis behind the Quark? Quark was based on very simple and exact philosophy: 1. everything is in box, 2. PostScript, 3. you may change the position of box by typing numbers. In that time, Quark was in version 1, it was everything what PCs (personal computers) were able to manipulate in "real" time. Many effects were quit simple by a bit calculation and typing. PageMaker????

You nailed it. It was the numerical precision; that was Quark's "secret sauce." I remember realizing I could trust those "rulers" everywhere. When it said "4 picas," visually or numerically, it would be precisely four picas on the film I got back. And the dimensions would be correct no matter what onscreen magnification I was using -- I could zoom in and out on any element in the file and stuff didn't move around (the way it did in PageMaker). The elements that were supposed to line up, lined up, no matter how tightly or widely I was viewing them. Quark taught the computer -- with its 72 dpi screen and complex, nebulous approaches to typography -- to be as precise as paper.

(I remember the first time I realized that Quark would let me specify if the outline on an element was supposed to extend its thickness inside or outside the grid dimensions of the element. Amazing! Nowdays Illustrator does that (and has for years), but it's not part of the basic PostScript protocol and it's amazingly impressive that Quark could do it at the time. "Put a four-point outline on that box...and I want the outline inside the box!")

It seems like prepress/design is the only field of technology-based endeavor where nobody says, "You know what? These guys do it for a living; why don't we listen to them."

Absolutely right!!!

Not really, speaking as someone who works in general IT Support, that is an IT problem in general. People ask for your help and opinions, ignore them completely and go off half cock on their own.

And generally start shouting at you when they mess it up.

Point taken, but prepress/design may be the only field of technology-based endeavor where you see this -- where, on a technology-based website like this one, in a highly specialized discussion about something as specific as Quark vs. InDesign...with all kinds of obviously experienced and knowledgeable professionals coming out of the woodwork to chime in...you still get these disrespectful people contradicting us, telling us to stop complaining because they know better.